Hey everyone! Conash again! First off, gotta start by saying that the mini-release is going to be delayed, we ran into various issues and couldn’t finish up the new quest in time so sorry backers, we’ll work to get it done as soon as we can!
Now, for the meat of this blog post, I actually wanted to ask for some suggestions from most of you. See, there have been various minor issues with the combat system some new (like how some people would like the skill/item menus to be how they were before) and some old (like the rate that the battlelog text scrolls making it difficult to read). None of these issues are by themselves are big enough projects that I’d set aside a month or two to dive into the scripts dealing with them, but they’re really piling up and I’m planning on trying to deal with them hopefully in the upcoming month (depending on how available my time is). To that end, I wanted to ask you all if there was anything that really stood out to you that was off about the battle system, or suggestions that you had as I want to try to get all of these little issues taken care of at once. Though, I do feel that I should mention that based off of my schedule and how this is more of a personal project, if I don’t have it ready by the 0.29 public release there’s a good chance it won’t be making it into the game before the 0.32 release (in January), hopefully it won’t take that long but we’ll see…
Oh, I almost forgot, given that I am asking you all for suggestions, I figured that I should list out what my plans were! So, in regards to the battlelog the solution seems to be to add something to the option menu to let players toggle how fast it is, this little change will probably be a bit more intensive than the others since I’ll not only have to fight the battlelog itself but also the options menu and will take some tedious testing to make sure everything works right. Next the plan is to find out how to switch the skill/item menu in battle to how it used to be and probably do it, I’m open to the idea of making the old big menus or the new small menus something that players could toggle between but given that’d be about a day or two worth of additional scripting I’m going to hold off on the toggle until I know for sure that there are players who would be interested in having the smaller item/skill menu. Another change that hopefully will be easy to implement is changing the numbers that pop up when you do damage to be different colors based on the elemental damage done, that much shouldn’t be too hard since Yanfly has an addon for that specifically but I’ll have to ensure that there aren’t any conflicts with that, but again that one’s easy once I’m already dealing with the combat system as a whole. There have also been some minor visual hiccups that I’ve noticed, stuff like how if your team has someone with regens or DoTs on them that the numbers stay where their portrait was while the entire party menu on the bottom shifts to the left, or how when you’re using an item/skill on an ally that the portrait of who is using it will cover the final party member, those sorts of hiccups I also plan on handling and while it’ll be annoying to fight with them, it’s nothing that I’m not used to!
So yeah, sorry about the long ramble there, but if any of you have any issues, ideas, or suggestions for a battle system update please leave a comment or otherwise let me know so that I can look into trying to add it into my little combat system update…. Whenever I get to it >.>
With the way you keep changing the icons for various spells and effects every couple of releases, we need an in-game guide to what the different icons mean as it makes it difficult to tell at a glance what those icons mean without a reference guide.
That will be a thing, eventually. But hey, at least we’re not using the same icon for like six different things anymore!
Honestly I haven’t had much issue with the battle system so far, and I’ve had my share of dots and buffs and the likes. I didn’t even really notice the difference in item menu before you just mentionned it, admittedly. As for the speed of the battle log, well I mostly thought it was a bit fast to get the messages caught for the screenshots of my let’s play. But otherwise it feels readable to me. Honestly I was happy with battle changes the moment the dots and regen effects actually popped up numbers instead of leaving you in the dark.
The elementally colored numbers would be neat though. However, wouldn’t that mean you’d have to change the critical number pop up as well, to reflect the elemental color, given it’s all rainbowy and all?
My suggestions:
the color of a number should indicate whether it’s to health, mana, momentum, or whatever. For element type, postfixing the numbers with an elemental symbol or spell/action symbols (same as the ones in the menus) might be a good idea.
For the scrolling battle log, a menu option to adjust the speed would be okay. My preference though, would be a button in the combat screen that brings you to a full-screen battle log, possibly with the option to export it to a file or something. That way you could see the whole battle in detail if needed, and you could choose to do so part-way through a battle if you suddenly realized that you need to know what was going on with something. I’m not sure if the full-screen battle log mode should be dedicated to examining the log or leave the combat interface function so you could continue to fight while primarily seeing the log.
And personally, I’d like options to have more things in battle happen simultaneously. Like, so that while one enemy was showing the dieing graphic/text, another enemy could start dieing.
Thanks for your suggestions. For the popups, I might be able to display the element graphic next to the numbers, I’ll try looking into the matter when I do get around tot his combat update. As for the full-screen battle log, I’m afraid that simply will not be making it into this combat update, that would require a massive overhaul of the battle system to get it to display correctly without crashing the game, it would have to be an entire scripting project in of itself so I couldn’t really fit it into this group of several fixes, though I’ll make sure to keep the suggestion in mind for the future. As for the issue with things not happening at the same time, I’ll look into the matter, see if anything in particular slows up the battle process that I could fix up, shouldn’t be a huge issue as I already had to deal with something like that for animations for people who had two weapons (Elaiya) to ensure that it didn’t take a really long time showing the entire weapon 1 animation and then the entire weapon 2 animation.
Elaiya’s attack still feels slow to me. I’m not sure it actually is, but it feels that way to me, and I refuse to put Elaiya in my party because of that. Her techniques feel slow to me too, at the ones I wanted to use.
I’ll take a look at it, originally when I put in the Yanfly battle system it was taking about 2-3 times as long as it currently takes so I basically pulled an arbitrary time for it to wait for the second animation and it looked like it was roughly how long she used to take so I just went with it. I could probably tighten it up some more so I’ll look into doing that.
So some updates now that I’ve gotten some of the combat stuff dealt with:
1. I’ve gotten damage to display the element icon next to it, HP, MP, and TP damage should have already been displayed in different colors so that should be dealt with.
2. I had forgotten to mention but I had also planned to add in some short-cut buttons, that you could press to instantly go to attack, guard, skills, or maybe items. There’s been a few issues that I’ve had with it, but I’ve managed to get it working how I intended to.
3. Turns out that Yanfly already had a combat log like the kind that you asked for Scro, while I usually prefer to do things myself I figure that it’d probably be best to grab it and work on improving it rather than starting from scratch due to how annoying it’d be to build something like that from scratch. This may very well replace the battlelog speed option entirely as it’d allow people who want to read what stuff says to have an option without making the stuff they don’t want to read take longer to get through.
4. I see what you mean about the Elaiya animations, I’ve worked to speed them up considerably. Though in regards to enemy death animations that one looks like it’d be quite a bit harder to deal with so I’m going to put a pin in that and see if I can think of something in the future.
There’s also a few other things that I plan to talk to NoMoshing about that might help smooth things along some more…. I’ve also got a few other things to deal with but they weren’t issues that you had commented on so blah.
I think you guys should focus on finishing the main game or whatever you plan for it.
The way I see it, after 4 years, barely half of the game is completed base on what Nomoshing has promised us 2 years ago (end of current story, new kingdom, now story etc etc)
We are primarily focusing on that, however that is largely on NoMoshing’s end as he handles the writing, map design, and overall planning. I handle enemy creation, scripting, and bug fixes, so while NoMoshing has to put in a lot of time to work on the quests I am left with ample time to work on these various projects that help add more to the game or improve what’s already there, especially since map design tends to slow us down more than anything and it’s something that I’m really not capable of handling.
Honestly, the combat system is crap. Not your fault though – every single RPGmaker game I played so far had a crappy combat system (except for some fights in Harem and Overwhored, but I’ll get to that).
For one, most stat effects other than poison and paralysis seem to make no difference – blinded archers will still hit you, for example. Also, since bosses are immune to most stat effects, fighting them soon turns into repetitive attacking and healing without anything remotely resembling strategy.
In general, combat in RPGmaker games is boring enough that I use the Autobattle option in every game that has it.
The only exception are scripted fights (Like submitting Sarah in Harem or fighting the Heroines in Overwhored) that aren’t based on dealing as much damage as possible, but require some type of strategy such as disarming the opponent or defeating the enemies in a specific order (which is really hard if your team is made up solely of AoE mages). But I guess scripting every single Bossfight would be too much work.
What I’d suggest is that you either give the option of avoiding battle alltogether, give some way of automated battling (Like what Harem has) or reduce the Bosses HP quite a bit (perhaps turning Damage up instead) so that using the right strategy, you can defeat them in five to ten turns.
Other than that, the ability to switch partymembers without having to enter a playerhome would be nice. I’ve often entered dungeons only to find out that my standard setup (MC, Yeon, Kyrie, Therese) was unable to deal proper damage due to elemental incompability.